Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia, Oliver Sachs has. He describes in the New Yorker and provides a link to the researchers who are in search of subjects. Read the description of the following topics:

Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is an impairment in face recognition. It is often accompanied by other types of deficits in the recognition (recognition, the recognition of cars, the facial expression of emotion, etc) but sometimes appears to be restricted to facial identity. It is not surprising that prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as the recognition through the side.

History

Reports of prosopagnosia date back to antiquity, but the report Bodamer (1947) of two individuals was a historical document that describes in detail the symptoms and said that was different from agnosia. He referred to his status as prosopagnosia, which was coined by combining the Greek word for face (prosopon) with the medical term for the deterioration of recognition (agnosia). Since then, over one hundred case reports have been published.

Symptoms of prosopagnosia

Everyone sometimes has trouble recognizing faces, and even more common that people have trouble remembering other people’s names. Prosopagnosia is much more severe than these everyday problems that everyone experiences. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing people who have found many times. In extreme cases, prosopagnosia have trouble recognizing even people who spend more time with him, their spouses and children.

One of the telltale signs of prosopagnosia is great reliance on non-facial information such as hair, gait, clothing, voice, and other information. Prosopagnosics also sometimes have difficulty imagining the facial appearance of acquaintances. One of the most common complaints is that prosopagnosia have trouble following the plot of television shows and movies, because they can not keep track of the identity of the characters.

If you would like to assess their facial recognition capabilities, we currently have two available face recognition tests. These tests include comments on how to compare their scores with the scores of people with normal facial recognition.

The causes of prosopagnosia

Most cases of prosopagnosia have been documented to have been due to brain damage suffered after maturity from a head injury, stroke and degenerative diseases. These are examples of acquired prosopagnosia: these individuals had the normal capacity of face recognition that were impaired below. It seems likely that more cases of acquired prosopagnosia have been published for two reasons. First, deterioration in the face is usually quite obvious to these people, because they have experienced normal facial recognition in the past and so I quickly notice that their deterioration. Second, because these individuals have had brain injuries, which are in contact with doctors who have evaluated their facial recognition capabilities. (Note that if you have experienced a significant reduction in facial recognition capabilities, should immediately contact a neurologist. Any sudden decrease may indicate the existence of a condition that requires immediate attention.)

By contrast, in cases of developmental prosopagnosia, the onset of prosopagnosia occurred before the normal development of facial recognition skills (adult levels of face recognition are achieved during adolescence). prosopagnosia development has been used to refer to people whose prosopagnosia is genetic in nature, individuals who experienced brain damage prior experience with faces (prenatal brain damage or brain damage immediately), and people who experienced brain damage or problems severe vision during childhood. However, these causes must be differentiated because they are different paths to prosopagnosia and probably lead to different kinds of disabilities, but called prosopagnosia might be genetic, and prosopagnosia prosopagnosia postexperiential preexperiential respectively. In some cases it may be difficult to determine the cause of prosopagnosia, but often people do not know that family members are also prosopagnosic or be aware of any incidents that may have resulted in brain damage.

People with developmental prosopagnosia often do not realize that they are incapable of recognizing faces, and others. Of course, they have never recognized faces normally so their impairment is not obvious to them. It is also difficult for them to realize, because individuals with normal face recognition rarely discuss their dependence on their faces. As a result, a number of individuals who have recognized their prosopagnosia until well into adulthood. We have been in contact with much more development prosopagnosics acquired prosopagnosia, so it may be that this condition is more common than acquired prosopagnosia.

Explanations

A variety of explanations for prosopagnosia. Of course, all these explanations suggest that the procedures necessary for normal face recognition is not working properly. However, the explanations differ in their characterization of procedures for alteration. It appears that actually refers to the prosopagnosia a number of different types of impairments, so that explains one will be responsible for all cases of prosopagnosia.

Research Questions

Currently we have a very limited understanding of prosopagnosia, and thus there are many research questions that need to be answered. Some of the key questions are:

What is the nature of the procedures that are impaired in prosopagnosia?
What brain regions are impaired in prosopagnosia?
Which genes are involved with genetically based prosopagnosia?
Are there methods by which prosopagnosia can improve face recognition?
Why prosopagnosics navigation often have problems as well? (See this page for more information about navigation problems)
What is the prevalence of prosopagnosia?

Research participants needed

The main reason we have a limited understanding of prosopagnosia is that prosopagnosics few have been extensively researched. This is especially true for development prosopagnosia. Recently, however, the Internet has made it much easier for researchers to make contact and prosopagnosia, and seems likely to see an increase in the amount of research in the near future.

If you think you are prosopagnosic or have other types of deficits in the recognition and are interested in getting involved with the investigation, please contact us using our form. We will try to get you involved with the research we are carrying out can put you in touch with researchers in your area. The studies typically include three or four hours of evaluation.

In addition to providing important data for research on prosopagnosia, prosopagnosics often find better understand their test condition. For example, we evaluate the capabilities with a variety of types of objects (horses, flowers, cars, etc) and try other types of face processing (emotional expression recognition, gender, age, and attractiveness through face, the gaze direction determination). These are skills that are difficult to assess and self-realization of the unknown obstacles can often help people cope better with their disabilities.